All posts by myonecall

Interested in how your company’s’ Sales and Marketing stacks up? This mini quiz will give you a quick view of how you compare in some areas to other company’s, as well as you give you some idea’s on how to improve.

When finished feel free to call us to set up a free 30 minute consultation on the results, and how to improve your closing percentages, lead generation and sales fast. Call 303 808 1734, or email me at mike.bayes@gmail.com

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Interested in a full Sales and Marketing tune up that's guaranteed to increase your sales and lead generation quality? Read about it here . $500 off if you sign up before January 1 2017. See details on link.

Business development is a term that generally is viewed as a “sales” function. At My One Call we view it as the opportunity to develop a business in any of the three main areas a business must preform in, those being.

Operations

Finance

Sales

An area overlooked by many companies is the development of new branded service offerings. As an example one of our clients who is a general contractor identified a unique and undeserved market. In Denver, there are 10 areas of the city zoned for ADU’s, which stands for Accessory Dwelling units, or in other words, a separate residence built on your home lot, or above the garage or in a basement, that serves as a second residence. It can be rented out for additional income.

ADU floor plan

The Denver areas rents have sky rocketed making these Garage apartments, or carriage house, or basement apartments very attractive to rent. Yet no one in Denver has been specializing in these, perhaps because residential construction is so hot right now.

So our client L & D Construction is building a division that includes construction, Real Estate, Finance and marketing to both educate and sell to homeowners in Denver.

As they become the “voice” of the ADU community, they may build a brand that is far ahead of any other business. That’s smart business development!

You can read a little about ADU’s as Garage Apartments, basement apartments or carriage house on their blog.

Recently, Mike Bayes was interviewed by the Reach Connect Uplift Women show about the biggest issues businesses have with their Local SEO. Although these tips are not all inclusive, they are very important to your website’s rankings. Listen to this 13-minute video to hear about the main Local SEO basics.

Recently we have been hearing a lot from webmasters about recommending citation services for their clients. This interview may convince you to be a little more careful going down that path.

The 5 most important factors that can hurt your site’s ranking are.

@ Inconsistent NPA across the web (Name address and phone number of your company)

@ Use the right meta tags on every page.

@ Don’t use third party tracking numbers

@ Not using your address on your site

@ Not listing in the BIG local directories. (Google My Business, Yelp and others)

And here is a video with Matt Cutts from Google on the most common SEO mistakes. This isn’t specific to Local SEO but applies across the board.

@ Make your site crawlable

@ Include the right words on the page.

@ Put your business hours on the site

@ Compelling content and marketing (not link building)

@ Title and descriptions of the most important pages

@ Not using Web Master researches.

Between these two videos, you will have a great start on having a “visible” website in the search engine results.

Call us for a free 30-minute review of your site! 720-254-1234. We are a Denver area-based Local SEO services company.

It’s pretty common knowledge that a good review from your customer is going to have a positive effect on your web visibility. Clearly those map listings that, in addition to the standard information also show a star rating, are more than likely to get a better click through rate. Note the screen shot below. Which two reviews are going to catch your eye? But there’s more to the power and value of a review than just click through rates.

Semantic SEO is playing a larger and larger role in how your site will be ranked and who will view it (depending on Googles perception of the searchers intent.

How that might affect your sites visibility is in the words the reviewer uses in the review. It would seem to be common sense, but when asking for a review, you may want to help your customers with some of the words they could use.

If I was a dentist, and I wanted a certain type of dentistry to stand out, I would ask for the reviewer to mention “Orthodontics“. I don’t think you need to ask them to use the word…. but you could suggest they mention the procedure they had.

When you request a review or encourage your clients to write one, it’s very helpful to them if you give some ideas on what they might want to say….

For our clients we suggest they send out a request, with full step by step instructions on the process of getting to the review page, and then give a few ideas to get them started.

Things like… what was the project we worked on for you?

What city are you in?

Were you happy with the?

– Service

– Scheduling

– Office staff

-Customer service

– value delivered.

By helping in this way you should see a better response, and a better result in web visibility because semantically your reviews are matching the services you want to be highlighted.

And it doesn’t hurt to take a look at your company description on your Google My Business listing, and make sure it reflects your business goals as well. Again, if you are a Dentist (And we don’t do web visibility for Dentists) and you want to do more Orthodontics, well then you may want to use that word as well as the phrases that relate to it in your description, and mentioned in reviews.

And, I guess it goes without saying, ask the type of customers you want more of to provide reviews. <<<<< Smart.

I want to caution you to never write a fake review or have one written. Following Googles guidelines is important, as well as any other platform you want to see reviews of your business on.

Many sales consultants and sales coaching firms talk about the 5 to 7 numbers you need to understand to grow your
business. In every case they start with the number of leads you will need, and then move to how many you need to covert
to customers, and then average revenue per customer… so on and so on.

These 5 or 7 numbers are all based on missing elements!

But here is whats missing, and it is the foundation of lead generation. You must start with what you can pay for a new
customer, and then apply your conversion or closing rate to get to the number of leads, not that you need, but what you
can afford! You can then see dramatic improvement in obtaining more leads by improving your closing percentage.
Increasing your closing percentage will dramatically increase the number of leads you can afford.

Generating leads is easy! I’ll say it again, GENERATING LEADS is easy. Paying for leads is the challenge. Hey, if you have a
big enough budget lead generation isn’t the problem.

Now, for those of us who have a limited budget, lets look quickly at how you build your lead generation program, and
eventually your sales plan from it.

What can you pay for a customer?

This could be a percentage of your gross sales price. It’s going to depend on your gross margins. If your gross
margins are 50%, you may be able to pay 30% for a new customer. If your gross margin is 27% (about as low
as many business can go and survive), you may only be able to use 7% of the gross for a customer.

So. Your average ticket is $20,000. You can pay 7% for a customer, thats $1400.00. You close 20% of your
leads, so you can pay one 5th of the customer cost, or $280.00 per lead.

Apply that number to your monthly advertising and marketing budget and
now you at least you know how much you can spend and how many leads that will produce.

( now work with us to increase your closing percentage and you will be able to afford more
leads, its a success cycle!)

As a client we will work with you on these areas to produce a lead generation program that grows your sales
fast.

How to spend your money to generate leads with your budget
How to increase the number of leads based on your budget
How to close more sales from the leads you receive
How to compensate your sales force
And many more.

That’s one of the top questions you can ask yourself before you start hunting for new customers.

This is Important! >>>>>

Like so many things in business (and life) selling and buying are cyclical. Most industries buy during certain time periods, and sell during certain time periods. Generally they will buy right before they start their sales season, or right after. Those periods of time may vary, and vary vastly (I just used vary vastly because I thought it has an interesting sound) … so when it’s time for you or your business to build a sales and marketing campaign, start with this question.

When does my prospect buy my services?

How far in advance do they start looking for me?

Where do they look to find my service/product? (access)

What information are they looking for? (educate)

Once you have this information, and you should be able to gather it from your past sales and those sales cycles, or just using common sense, you now can plan your campaign. (You’re welcome).

When it comes to planning, I like the old saying attributed to Abe Lincoln. “If I had 8 hours to cut down a tree, I’d spend 7 of those sharpening the axe”.

I like to frame a campaign around the SAVE marketing process, or at least view it through it’s
properties, those being :

S. This is the fix to whatever problem they are trying to solve. ( Called solution in this system)

A. Access. This one I use in any sales or marketing plan. How is your prospect going to access your information? If you have answered the question, how will they find your business from the first set of questions, this becomes a no brainer. If you are guessing, go back and figure it out. YOU MUST KNOW how prospects find your service for any campaign to be a success. Don’t assume here, do your work, sharpen that axe!

V. Value. Okay.. over used, but there are really only two type value propositions… Price or value. So which are you? If you’re competing with price how well positioned are you. Are you in fact a great price for the fix you can provide, or are you just cheap. Just cheap is a losing proposition. Do you provide high end fixes that the prospect will pay for, then you need to clearly communicate how that will give a greater return than your competition, and make it as easy as possible. High end value propositions that carry the added weight of complexity are losers. Value with simplicity … thats a sharp axe!E. Education. This is tricky. Seriously, most prospects will contact you after they have completed a great deal of research. They are already educated, so over educating is a bore.

Here’s one way to educate. Once you know what they need from you, say, I can do that…
And then do a little Bruno Mars…. “Don’t believe me, just watch” BOOM!

Now dance, do the dance really well, and on beat…That means showing them right then and right there that you have exactly what they need. Bring out the testimonials… Boom, “delivered exactly what they wanted to a customer”…bring out the dashboard BOOM… just what they asked for, ready to roll… Bring up the website your company just built, and the customer already love’s… BOOM. Show them the price… in their budget and the terms they wanted.. BOOM.

I have got to stop watching so many funk videos, but you get the point, I hope. Educate on how your solution, or fix, is what they wanted. That’s education, don’t walk them through the boring a,b,c’s when they need 2+2 = 4.

Back to the season thing. None of this matters if the prospect isn’t in their buying season. And as you can figure out, you and your team will invest a bunch of time and money into the preparation of the campaign

Check out this screen shot. Let’s say your looking to get a free estimate to finish your basement. You search basement finishing company. Who would you click on?

I’ll bet your eyes were drawn to the two companies that have those 5 stars and a numerical rating. When you complete this search the screen is larger and the reviews are even more prominent.

Do your client or business a favor. Ask your customers to leave a Google review. It not only helps click through s, but it can also help your rankings.

More reviews, more clicks for people searching for your service. There are correct ways to ask, and it’s important to follow the Google review guidelines. If you aren’t familiar with those here is a link to the Google review guidelines.

In recent research on web sites that ranked on the first page of Google an interesting common thread appeared. I want to premise this with the information that this was a small view in a local area of a few competitive industries, those being Dentists and other related searches.

We looked at results from both organic and local pack results.

The MOZ trust factor was as consistent as a ranking factor as any other. Out performing Page Rank and Domain Rank. hmmm.

“We determine MozTrust by calculating link “distance” between a given page and a seeded trust source on the Internet. Think of this like six degrees of separation: The closer you are linked to a trusted website, the more trust you have, yourself.

We score MozTrust on a logarithmic scale between 0 and 10. Thus, it’s much easier to improve from a MozTrust of 3 to 4 than it is to improve from 8 to 9.

How can MozTrust be improved?

MozTrust can be improved by getting links from other sites with high MozTrust such as government institutions and universities.

For those of us who work in the SEO field, we know getting links (earning links) from government sites and universities can be very challenging. So the question becomes, where can a business earn links that are high trust sites, or very close to a high trust site.

It should be noted that the MOZ trust ranking will change depending on what page you are listed on in a site. So you may want to take the time to see how you can have your site mentioned on a page as close as possible to the home page.

Here are some Local type sites that can add trust ranking (and traffic) to your site.

Chamber of Commerce sites. I’ve seen several high ranked sites that have primarily chamber links (6-8).

Your Better Business Bureau. On some, even the individual business pages have strong trust factors.

Your local Newspapers and T.V. channels

Those are great sites to start with. And they make sense for reasons far beyond SEO.

More to follow as we look further into MOZ trust and its value and implementation on a site.